A Digitised Hologram of a Letter Intended as a Projected Lament so that the Funeral Procession of Prometheus Might Once Again Find its Way

Dear Anonymous,
I don't entirely agree with Heidegger myself, but the question of technology is by no means simple. You'll have to forgive me if I use too much of my own thinking here, or that of other authors, because it has been some time since I have read Heidegger. But I would contrast this idea of enframing with that of Marx's revalorisation of labour through the machine (in which dead labour is returned to living labour through machinic self-production). It is at this point that technology itself becomes value-in-process and begins to create its own form of value.

Nonetheless, we have a problem in that humans remain a circuit in this chain of value process, whereby the autonomy of the machine and the surrogacy of the human is only dominant in short-sightedness. Technology is 'enframed' by the human character of its productive need, which is never merely economic - there remains a deep cultural reasoning for mechanised production. This is made clear by the opposing manner in which political ideologies attempted to relate to their technology, and this is necessary because we recognise, at some level, that even living technology can bring death to itself. At this point essentially becoming its own 'standing reserve' waiting for us to revivify it.

While we can seek out the essence of singular technologies (what is the essence of the sexualised machine, or what is the essential character of the technical structure which makes animal husbandry and industrialised murder fundamentally the same?) it is a much deeper question to look into the essence of modern technology itself. And it should be clear that anyone saying that this is easy is either just fooling himself or attempting to fool others. Perhaps the distancing character of technology is a natural thing and it simply comes to pathology in the modern era - yet the problem remains that we are stuck with it, and within this era. The first socialist tragedy was that it failed to reconcile with technology; in capitalism, it is the final tragedy.

What do I mean by this? Socialism sought to block out the sun while capitalism sought to be blocked out by it (or its own recreation of it). And perhaps this explains the overwhelming descent into an autonomised technology in which men turn themselves into self-carving meat. The form of technology in the West has become that which blocks us out of the world, kills us off with the light of life. Here I think we approach some theological understanding of it.

Perhaps you will continue to insist that this is a simplicity, but I will ask you to explain this while keeping in mind that within simplicity there often resides necessity, truth, and importance - the truth should be considered no matter how monotonous it may seem to its observer. And to add some life to this we might ask ourselves in what way a society tends to direct its 'standing reserve'. Or to turn its own form of life against it, the question could be, 'What is the fulcrum which the standing reserve employs to overturn the world?' In this, technology disappears within the question of technology.

One can imagine the extent to which technology frees or is seen as a freeing force. In the Soviet technique it seems clear that the human must give himself over to technology, which will eventually release itself in the grand realisation of all this work recomposed as a final utopia. On the other hand, in the West technology is seen as mere necessity and arbiter of our own individual growth. No matter how out of control it gets we see ourselves as its master, or merely inconvenienced by a temporary enslavement to which we will rouse the sleeping king once again and overcome his aspects of domination. The false quality of technical relations is also rather interesting.

In WWII the British requested donations of rubber for the war effort, even though the civilian rubber was in no way transferrable to military use. The contrast of this rite with other national preparations is partly due to the gravity of the situation, but the constructed sacrifice of the British differs so greatly from the lines of Russian men, women, and children digging trenches around Stalingrad that the theological form comes to valorise in the world. Most telling was the brief Soviet reprieve on churches allowing people to return to worship amidst the siege, and the necessity of producing life within ruins. When total mobilisation releases the human back into the object of technology it reveals a wholly other character. As the Grey Human trudges forth we should not forget this lesson.

But let's investigate the standing reserve even further. I don't think the militaristic tone of this phrase can be escaped, and it is likely intentional (perhaps someone can clarify any intricacies of the translation for us, as I am only learning German). The term implies mobilisation within its very waiting, and so it presumes a living contradiction, and the real standing reserve - at least in Britain - reveals this contradiction in an interesting way. With total warfare it is strange how the civilian reserve is even more militarised than the military itself, with much of the culture, propaganda, and mania of warfare expressing itself on the homefront. Meanwhile, the actual soldiers are too enmeshed within the endless confrontation to ever even consider nationalism. Individualism takes over, and not in the romantic liberal sense, but in a brutalised state of nature sense: an individual exiled into survival. If he never even sees the enemy it is because his enframing exists as the fine filing of the maelstrom within the gun barrel. At the end of nationalism the civilian homefront stares through the sights (attached by reclaimed boards, nails, and tape to a trench periscope).

Perhaps nothing sums up this contradiction better than a short war poem:

"By the ears and the eyes and the brain,

By the limbs and the hands and the wings,

We are slaves to our masters the guns;

But their slaves are the masters of kings!"

Technology itself has been abstracted, and we extricate ourselves into its non-being. And yet in our total loss of subjectivity we become more powerful than ever. The man who stands at the gun is in competition with himself and his pals, attempting to outdo the men at the next gun - carrying and passing shells and deposing them into a chamber which explodes, and then the passing cycled into eternity. He does not see the enemy soldiers wavering in the pits, nor does he see the wasteland which this endless shelling creates. And somehow this abstraction is deepened at home, as the entire population becomes a standing reserve, mobilised as a static production in this endless line of shells. And it is in this widened vision of the homefront that the 'hawklike with marking their prey' deepen the territory from which a wasteland appears.
Or, again with the trench gun, the horizon within the sights of technology is its focusing on that which will be consumed. It turns ever so slightly, revealing a new form—and it is an assemblage rather than an accumulation. Over time the trench gun sheds the husk of its roughshod assembly, and the turning, reflective sight which kills no longer needs an apparatus to do its work. The form of life is instrumentalised by its own enmeshing. This is the problem with bare translations of the ancients, the form may have only revealed part of itself in its enframing of the world at that point.

Here we see that, contrary to science ignoring it, the primordial is deepened - for it is concerned with nothing else than its unveiling. The human is written out of the equation entirely, and within the hawklike vision attempting to possess the enemy with his death the human eye becomes focused on its singular task: mesmerized by the sparks and the pounding, how the angle approaches a beautiful curvature enmeshing its creator in victory, power, the doom of another. Our vision narrows until we become the Cyclops enchained to the necessity of Hephaestus, and so technique is no longer that contained in the Promethean gift; we become lost in the blinding fire, and once again the stolen gift is returned to the Gods, and lost to us. Beyond the short-sightedness of techne.

We are monstrous and in service to a wounded God, yet this drives us on all the more. Technology is merely the fate of a fated foresight, for the God of trade is also the God of thieves—and the guide into the underworld. Without Prometheus, technology loses its living nature, its foresight and fire, and instead becomes a monstrous arching bridge between our descent into the underworld and our holding onto life. As the knowledge of our death approaches, ever closer, we hold on all the more. Technology is our own overstretching back into the world, it is our denial of form, and we are in mourning of ourselves. The chasm creates its own intricacy.
Mourning the loss of our humanity, and the necessity of our becoming one with the primordial. What else was the industrial era other than the technological vision of its fate in Doom? The earth leaks Moros, or its material death at least, and humanity turns to an alchemy of animating the blackened earth into a tonic for its machines.

Humanity reduced to sweeping up after the primordial, clearing the ruins. The Russian remains in retreat while his factory sirens wail at the loss of its workers - the Russian soul mourned by industry itself. And anyone who gets the grand metaphor is left to ask, what of the fascists? The explosive answer is to say that they were nothing but the munitions warehouses, while the sympathetic answer is that they were the silence of abandoned and rubble-strewn streets, left behind after the thundering echo of a final shot; that deathly silence after a massive loss for which there can be no words. And we tend to focus on this all the more as the explosion loses its resonance. There is no one leftto sweep up.

Modernity creates a strange position for us: enmeshed by technology and yet somehow weaving our way out of it. Perhaps most telling is the divided worlds of men and women in their experience of its instrumentalising rituals, for their confrontation with technology is in no way the same. There is a great chasm between the two humans, and we are at a point when only men can sing the strophes and antistrophes to Prometheus - wishing to see what could have been produced if he had replaced the Cyclops in the hellish foundries of Hephaestus. The socialists lament in the chorus of his rattling chains, for they wish to take his place, yet knowing they can never be the Oceanids; the fascists chant to the eagle tearing away at his liver, as they beg for an endless rebirth of that which can never be their own; and the liberals warble away into the abstraction which is the voice of Zeus, commanding all of these labours of terror, as they believe they might succeed where Hermes never could.

And the chorus chugs on:

"It's shameful for the wise to dwell in error!

It's shameful for the wise to dwell in error!

It's shameful for the wise to dwell in error!

It's shameful for the wise to dwell in error!"

And into eternity a variation echoes on of what could never be.

"Wise are the worshippers of Adresteia."